Darren wrote:
Thank you for providing these, along with the information on the MFD. As it's a beam index CRT it's not the part I originally thought it was.
Here's another (long) technical snippet - the MFD (monochrome) was raster driven (line by line like a TV) but the MFCD (colour) was stroke driven, similar to the HUD to get better brightness. But this made in-flight recording a real bugger - for recording purposes, the MFCD had to generate a duplicate of the MFCD display with raster format since that's all the V250 video recorder could use.
In fact, the obstacles to recording MFCD were even worse than that - the MFDP, which drove MFD and MFCD, could only generate monochrome video, so the TSD (Tactical Situation Display = colour Map) was recorded as a frame of Red, a frame of Green, a frame of Blue. And if the pilot was recording two video sources simultaneously things were even more messy (frame of Red, frame of monochrome, frame of Green, frame of monochrome, frame of Blue, frame of monochrome frame of Red, etc.) After the mission, for debriefing purposes the VRGE took the output of the video player and capture and identified the different video frames, combined Red, Green, Blue for a colour image if necessary, and routed the images to Left or Right monitor for the pilot to view.